Family planning clinics hard hit by funding cuts

Women helped by clinics halved.

Updated 1:46 am, Saturday, September 29, 2012

University Health System has closed four of its eight clinics that provide family planning after its annual state funding was slashed from $2 million to $600,000, said Theresa de la Haya, senior vice president of community health and clinical prevention programs.

The closures in San Antonio mean more low-income women will go without preventive services, such as pap smears, which screen for cervical cancer, she said.

“We're going to see women coming in at later stages of the disease process and more women with possible unwanted pregnancies,” she said Thursday.

The number of clients treated annually at UHS clinics dropped from 10,000 to 5,000, she said, since the Legislature made the cuts in 2011.

In what many said was a calculated move by conservative lawmakers to starve Planned Parenthood, state family planning funds were cut from $111.5 million to $37.9 million for the biennium, reducing services to as many as 180,000 women in Texas a year, according to state health department officials.

Mara Posada, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Trust of South Texas, said its four San Antonio clinics that received state money — almost $680,000 in 2010 — lost all that funding with the cuts. But none of the four, which last year treated more than 14,000 patients, has closed or reduced its hours.

She credited private donations; the nonprofit raised $1.5 million last year and expects to raise the same amount this year, she said.

But, Planned Parenthood consolidated two clinics in Brownsville. It shuttered two clinics in the Valley, in Alice and Raymondville, for the same reason.

“It's unfortunate, because those are rural health centers that are sorely needed,” Posada said.

None of the clinics getting state or federal money can by law provide abortion services.

“Ostensibly, the purpose of the law was to defund Planned Parenthood in an attempt to limit access to abortion, even though federal and state funding cannot be used for abortion care anyway. Instead, these policies are limiting women's access to a range of preventive reproductive health services and screenings,” a team of academics from the University of Texas at Austin's Population Research Center wrote in the journal article.

“Cuts to family planning hurt Texas families. They mean higher costs to the state in births and unintended pregnancies,” said Kristine Hopkins, a UT research assistant professor in sociology who helped conduct interviews for the report.

Officials at CentroMed, which provides family planning at a number of state-funded clinics throughout San Antonio, were not available for comment Friday.

In the Houston area, seven clinics that received state funding for family planning services closed their doors, and 13 more have reduced service hours, according to the study.

Seven Houston-area clinics are among 53 Texas clinics that closed between last September and this May.

None of the 11 clinics operated by Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast closed because of the funding cuts. More patients are being asked to pay for services out-of-pocket, resulting in a slight decline in medical visits and increased anxiety among patients, spokeswoman Rochelle Tafolla said.

Many clinics, including Planned Parenthood, have started charging patients higher fees or restricting access to highly effective birth control, such as IUDs and implants, because of the state funding cuts.

“Some providers have started waiting lists for IUDs and implants in the unlikely event that they can purchase them with money left over at the end of a funding period. In addition, as more women are steered toward contraceptive pills, they are being provided with fewer pill packs per visit, a practice that has been shown to result in lower rates of continuation with the method and that may increase the likelihood of unintended pregnancy, and therefore that of abortion,” according to the research.

A study released last year by the Guttmacher Institute concluded that every $1 of government money invested in contraception saves $3.74 in Medicaid expenditures for pregnancy-related care related to births from unintended pregnancies. It could take years for all of the unintended consequences of these cuts to surface, researchers said.

Rachel Bohannon, spokeswoman for Texas Right to Life, said the state money is simply being redirected to clinics that don't promote or refer to abortion services.